Tuesday, February 13, 2018

When Is the Right Time to Invest More in Digital Marketing? | Evolvor Media

Digital marketing is evolving at light speed. If you want to be able to measure your marketing ROI, digital marketing and unique creativity can be ideal solutions on various fronts. An average business is said to spend a very small percentage of their annual revenue on digital marketing, but with such big returns, now is the right time to make your move if you’re thinking about starting to invest or invest more in your digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing is a big deal and it costs money, regardless of how growth-hacky or budget savvy you might be. There are various forums that require spending, such as content creation, email marketing, mobile marketing, conversion rate optimization, blog creation, SEO and PPC, website development, design, video production, etc.

As Mediakix cites, more than 80% of marketers who have launched a digital marketing campaign (involving social media influencers) found them to be effective for driving brand awareness and engagement. However, with the sophistication of digital marketing, data and measurement solutions are now more robust, creating many other options for designing a digital marketing strategy that will work for you and help you overcome your biggest obstacles. If you’re thinking about investing in digital marketing, the situations below illustrate when the time is right.

1. Your audience has stopped growing

Not one brand wants a stagnant audience growth. By investing in digital marketing, you extend your audience reach and are able to tap into larger communities, aim to reach a specific, more targeted audience, and engage them as your brand’s audience. Influencer marketing is a digital marketing technique that can serve as a serious audience growth engine that you’ve been looking for this whole time. If your audience has stopped growing, it’s time to rethink the strategies and plans you’ve been using online. Try to build connections instead of trying to be an expert, don’t try to copy industry leaders (people do business with the originals), provide value, send a unique message, and stay consistent in your endeavors.

2. Your competition is beginning to outrank you online

As you may know (if you’re familiar with SEO), websites are ranked on search engines, such as Google. If you sell construction material, what you want is to have your website rank highly for the search query “best construction material”. However, what happens when your competition begins to outrank you? It means that they are doing a better job with their SEO than you – perhaps they have superior content, better keyword targeting, and better-optimized websites. This is a sign that you need to invest more on content marketing and SEO.

3. You’re forgetting to do conversion optimization

In the past years, businesses could afford to overlook conversion optimization because it was a relatively new niche. Today, it’s considered a serious oversight when it comes to digital marketing. Business owners shouldn’t even think about neglecting this aspect. Conversion rate optimization includes making data-driven changes to your brand’s website to increase the percentage of visitors who take desired actions. You have a certain amount of website traffic, and you aim to turn more visitors from ‘potential’ to ‘paying’ customers. Conversion rate optimization doesn’t actually cost much, when compared to acquiring customers, impressions, clicks and eyeballs. You can increase your conversion rate through a process of sequential tests and strategic changes.

4. Your business is failing

You’re experiencing negative cash flow, can’t get a loan due to a bad credit profile, or can’t get the pricing of your products and services right. This has led you close to the point of no return – either you’ll go bankrupt or do something to save your business. One of the potential solutions is to get some affordable bad credit loans (loans for those with a bad credit profile) and rethink your marketing strategy with the help of a professional digital marketer or digital marketing agency. Take a few hundred or thousand dollars, and start paying for Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, start blogging, or invest in influencer marketing. Organic social media marketing and SEO can even be done without any investing, that is, if you have enough human resources and time. There’s a great possibility that your competitors are already optimizing their websites to be more visible on search engines, blogging engaging content, attracting social media followers, and earning the confidence and trust of your desired market.

5. You want to grow your business

Your startup has grown enough to be recognizable by wider audiences, and has been prosperous for a few years. Now, you’re thinking about expanding your business operations and grow bigger. Thanks to digital marketing, businesses of all sizes have the necessary resources to perform marketing and sales processes that used to be available only to large corporations. It provides them the chance to compete and get their share of traffic. Unlike traditional marketing, going digital is more cost-effective and allows you to track and measure your success. You’re able to interact with your customers and provide them

with the right engagement points, which gives you insight into what your customers want. With digital marketing, you can cater to mobile consumers, build brand reputation, earn people’s trust, and ensure online business survival.

Conclusion

Marketers have always regarded the Internet as a vast laboratory, where they can launch one experiment after another to decipher the code that generates customer loyalty and more sales. Customers adopt new digital technologies as they themselves see fit, and it has forever changed the way they make their purchasing decisions. Thus, it is essential to understand this evolution in order to reshape their skills and processes, rethink their budgets and priorities, and direct digital interaction toward the focus of effective marketing strategies.

Business leaders can’t complain anymore how they can’t afford to spend more money on marketing. The world is speeding towards the point of digital saturation, so investing in digital marketing is probably the best thing you could do for your business. Digital marketing has come a long way, and It’s the answer you’re looking for. Brands need to know that there are numerous ways to leverage data to measure the return on investment of their digital marketing campaigns.

This was a guest article by Jolene Rutheford is a marketing specialist- turned blogger, currently writing for Bizzmark Blog and Technivorz. Interested in media and social media, digital marketing and psychology. Loves coffee, jazz, dystopian and fantasy movies.